Designing the new data center fabric: Nokia SR Linux and Event-Driven Automation

Ahmed Abutaleb outlines how Nokia IT formalized network-as-code—not via translators, but as real code that moves through a full software development lifecycle: Git versioning, branches, testing, and controlled merges to production. To make intent verifiable, they chose Nokia SR Linux for the network operating system (NOS) and Nokia Event-Driven Automation (EDA) as the network management/automation layer. EDA provides a true digital twin: the same control plane and code as production, fed the exact same intent/configs. This lets the team model migrations, run “what-if” scenarios (routing, load balancers, firewalls, server configs), validate behavior, and then push with confidence—without building massive physical labs. The result supports their NetOps goals—cloud-like consistency on-prem, closed-loop feedback on drift/deviations, safer changes—and contributes to roughly an 80% reduction in tickets.

This blog post is the third in a series of five with Ahmed Abutaleb and Scott Robohn on Nokia’s data center network migration. To see the other posts, visit: Data center networks blogs.